I did like it, but only gave it a three star rating because of some huge issues I had. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, but I felt as though the author took a stunning and eloquent story about the roles of women in the Second World War and turned it into a cheesy love story in the last 20%. In my opinion, the way that the main romance concludes takes away from the story and — during the last scene — the author equates the Nightingale’s tremendous work fighting the Nazi’s as equally important to her status as a “woman in love”.
I liked the book, but couldn’t get over this. The author did well initially in describing some of brutalities of war, but also romanticized it too much towards the ending, which was frustrating.
Dani_Happy on
I felt that way about The Need by Helen Phillips. I hated the experience of reading it, but it was also kind of genius and I adored the ending. I ultimately gave it 5 stars but I never want to read it again, haha. But then again it’s horror, so it probably achieved what it set out to do (making me incredibly stressed and uncomfortable).
Disastrous-Soil1618 on
I absolutely couldn’t put the Poppy War down but now that I’ve finished it, I’m pretty disgusted and angry about it.
EmotionalSnail_ on
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
WinterFirstDay on
“Aurora” by Kim Stanley Robinson. Not many books make me feel the mix of love and hate so much as this. And it’s not the book itself, the book objectively was very good, very to the point, very polished. It was the fact that all the way to the end I felt the hammer of reality hammering my dreams into the reality of real interstellar travel and real place of humanity in it (and I phrase it that way intentionally). There are a plenty of arguments that can be made about science and fiction in this book, but at the time of reading it felt so real to me I still (years later) remember it as the one of the most conflicting books without any real conflict that I’ve read in my reading career. The conflict was in me. It still is. It still tearing me apart.
5 Comments
The Nightingale
I did like it, but only gave it a three star rating because of some huge issues I had. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, but I felt as though the author took a stunning and eloquent story about the roles of women in the Second World War and turned it into a cheesy love story in the last 20%. In my opinion, the way that the main romance concludes takes away from the story and — during the last scene — the author equates the Nightingale’s tremendous work fighting the Nazi’s as equally important to her status as a “woman in love”.
I liked the book, but couldn’t get over this. The author did well initially in describing some of brutalities of war, but also romanticized it too much towards the ending, which was frustrating.
I felt that way about The Need by Helen Phillips. I hated the experience of reading it, but it was also kind of genius and I adored the ending. I ultimately gave it 5 stars but I never want to read it again, haha. But then again it’s horror, so it probably achieved what it set out to do (making me incredibly stressed and uncomfortable).
I absolutely couldn’t put the Poppy War down but now that I’ve finished it, I’m pretty disgusted and angry about it.
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
“Aurora” by Kim Stanley Robinson. Not many books make me feel the mix of love and hate so much as this. And it’s not the book itself, the book objectively was very good, very to the point, very polished. It was the fact that all the way to the end I felt the hammer of reality hammering my dreams into the reality of real interstellar travel and real place of humanity in it (and I phrase it that way intentionally). There are a plenty of arguments that can be made about science and fiction in this book, but at the time of reading it felt so real to me I still (years later) remember it as the one of the most conflicting books without any real conflict that I’ve read in my reading career. The conflict was in me. It still is. It still tearing me apart.